Deep water … the archipelago of St Kilda in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Rona is an eight-year-old living on a remote Scottish island. Life is quiet, particularly so since all the adults perished in an apparent mega-plague. Just five children are left, carrying on with lessons in an abandoned classroom, raiding houses for food, avoiding hungry dogs and tossing messages in bottles into the sea in the hope of rescue. But the radio picks up only static, and the youngest, little Alex, is running out of insulin.

The 100 best novels: No 74 – Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

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As the children scavenge from a nursing home, Rona gives us peek-through-the-fingers flashes of her surroundings: “Each bed in every room has an old dead person in it … I see one old lady whose face is like rotten bark on a tree.” The children find themselves in a daily struggle with their memories, desperately trying to preserve those of happier times, while blocking out encounters with decomposed corpses eaten by pets. While the eldest, Elizabeth, tries to keep up morale with boosterish enthusiasm, glowering local boy Calum Ian and his younger brother, Duncan, siphon petrol out of cars to start fires, hide food from the other children and rebel against Elizabeth’s leadership.

Ewing’s characterisation is subtler and more interesting than this precis might imply; Calum Ian isn’t a lazy cipher for atavistic cruelty, and much of the foreboding we feel comes through Rona’s perspective, who proves rather spiteful and destructive herself. Ewing does a fantastic job of making us feel like children again – not carefree, but lost in a confusing world replete with dangers over which we have little control. Rona’s narration is at its best when she is wrestling with emotions or concepts at the fringes of her ability to articulate: “I want to help Duncan, and Calum Ian, but all the same I don’t. I want to tell Calum Ian to be kinder to Alex, but it isn’t always easy to make someone be a good listener, especially if they’re sad.”

For much of the novel, however, the narrative voice isn’t sure whether it’s a frightened child, breathlessly fumbling her way through memories, or the standard literary authorial voice. At the start, Rona’s narration is framed as part confession, part prayer to her dead mother: “Mum – are you still listening? This is the story of how I got to be here.” But this immediate, personal style falls away whenever it becomes inconvenient. Rona describes snuggling down into her sleeping bag as her mother’s voice begins to echo in her head, and suddenly she’s accurately reporting adult speech verbatim – pauses and all – from months ago: “‘That doesn’t sound like – if the incubation is as long as that, but I have never heard of any potential pathogen with-’”

We can accept certain literary conventions – the tidying up of dialogue, the existence of a nominal audience for the narrator – but you can’t have a narrator be at once a nervous child, tracking their experience moment-by-moment in a simple register, then intermittently abandon that to deliver great lumps of exposition-heavy dialogue she doesn’t understand, with perfect recall.

For all the gore, not a lot happens. I can enjoy an elegiac rumination on what was lost, but it has to fill the space where we expect plot with a powerful voice and compelling, unique characters. Rona doesn’t have much insight into her predicament. The flashbacks baldly spell out what we already know. The flash-forwards all but give away most of the – not terribly surprising – plot developments. The dialogue often slips into ersatz theme-framing: “A lot of rubbish, making wishes.” Who speaks like that?

The Last of Us sits in a crowded genre of apocalypse lit-fic. It’s competent enough, but with so many gripping, masterful alternatives – Station Eleven, The Road, Lord of theFlies – it struggles to be innovative or memorable.